Detective Comics 2 (December 2011)

This issue is a little less rancid than the first one. Maybe I’m just amused by Daniel’s complete inability to write people talking to each other. Unless, of course, he’s trying to imply Bruce Wayne is flirting with some dude in the first scene.

Then, immediately following, when Wayne gets naughty with some TV reporter… it feels like a beard. If nothing else, Daniel’s Detective will be funny for the closeted gay Batman.

It also might help Daniel has inkers. The art’s still bad. I mean, I guess the Dollmaker and his family are supposed to be gross and scary, but Daniel and the inkers are too slick. It looks like these things could be action figures, not hideously deformed monsters.

Daniel goes with another cliffhanger, less “shocking” than the last one, but even stupider.

I did like seeing Paul Pope’s Year 100 bike getting some regular use.

Detective’s crap.

p style=”font-size:11px;”>CREDITS

Playtime’s Over; story and pencils by Tony S. Daniel; inkers, Ryan Winn and Sandu Florea; colorist, Tomeu Morey; letterer, Jared K. Fletcher; editors, Janelle Asselin, Katie Kubert and Mike Marts; publisher, DC Comics.

Detective Comics 1 (November 2011)

Batman has really small feet. I would have thought DC had an edict about Batman having big feet.

Tony Daniel’s writing is disastrous. His Batman narrates in the present tense; Daniel doesn’t understand how to write in present so it’s mostly past tense, but with present tense verbs. Maybe the editor just ran it through a “find and replace” function before it went to the printers.

But the tense isn’t the major problem. The major problem isn’t even Daniel trying to make Batman funny. The reader’s supposed to laugh at his observations about the terrible world around him.

The major problem is the dialogue. Daniel couldn’t write dialogue for a Hostess Fruit Pies ad convincingly. Reading it actually makes one embarrassed he or she is wasting time on Daniel.

Detective Comics stinks. Daniel thinks being mean is the same as being edgy. And his art’s lousy too, though not spectacularly.

CREDITS

Writer and penciller, Tony S. Daniel; inker, Ryan Winn; colorist, Tomeu Morey; letterer, Jared K. Fletcher; editors, Janelle Asselin, Katie Kubert and Mike Marts; publisher, DC Comics.